Surveillance society

“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered!”

So declared Number Six in the ground-breaking 1967 television series The Prisoner.

At the time of its production, the world was gripped in a Cold War, where surveillance and the gathering of data was an integral part of the way countries protected themselves. Number Six represented a challenge to this, as he would shout from the shoreline of The Village: “I am not a number, I am a free man!”

So what has changed?

The UK is one of the three top surveillance states in the world, next to China and Russia. In Britain there are presently over five million CCTV cameras recording our lives. Databases have been created for almost every facet of human behaviour, from shopping habits through club cards, to the surveillance promised land of mobile phones and the internet.
We are reassured that they are controlled by legislation and most specifically, the Data Protection